Who Benefits from Public Utilities?*

We model the determination of output, factor payments and prices within publicly owned firms, assuming the firms are managed by utility-maximizing employees monitored by vote-maximizing politicians. The choice of a public monopoly to supply the output is most suited to further the redistributive aims of the politicians, but will also be favoured by employees who can capture some rents.     

Liquidity or Credit Risk? The Determinants of Very Short‐Term Corporate Yield Spreads

Employing a comprehensive database on transactions of commercial paper issued by domestic U.S. nonfinancial corporations, we study the determinants of very short‐term corporate yield spreads. We find that liquidity plays a role in the determination of spreads but, somewhat surprisingly, credit quality is the more important determinant of spreads, even at horizons of less than 1 month. These results are robust across a variety of proxies for liquidity and credit risk, and have important implications for the literature on the modeling of corporate bond prices.     

The Causal Effect of Election Delay on Union Win Rates: Instrumental Variable Estimates from Two Natural Experiments

The role of election delay in union organizing campaigns has become a key policy issue in several countries. Previous studies have documented a negative correlation between delay and union success. However, elections are generally not randomly delayed; in particular, election delay is correlated with various “hard‐to‐observe” union and employer strategies. This article exploits several exogenous sources of variation in election delay to estimate a causal model. The results indicate that two‐stage least squares estimates of the causal effect of election delay on union success are twice the magnitude of standard OLS estimates.